Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 14 Fall 1996

              Obituary: Margot Cory
Margot Degen Batten Cory, the Santayana literary executrix, died in England on
March 30,1995, at the age of ninety-four.1 Her late husband, Daniel MacGhie Cory, had
been Santayana's closest friend and literary secretary and assistant during the last
twenty-five years of Santayana's life. After the philosopher's death in 1952, Daniel Cory
became Santayana's literary executor. Mrs. Cory succeeded her husband as the literary
executrix after his death on June 18,1972.
Margot (as she was called by family and friends; her real name was Margaret) Cory
was bom in England on November 27,1900, the eldest daughter of four children, to Rudolf
C. Degen, an English businessman, and his wife, Beatrice. Margot was educated at St.
Paul's girls' school in London, where the music teacher was Gustav Hoist, composer of
'The Planets." Her first marriage, to Rupert Batten, a journalist, ended in divorce. She
evidently met Daniel Cory in England during the early 1930s. Cory, bom in New York
City on September 27, 1904, was four years younger than his wife. In Cory's book,
Santayana: The Later Years: A Portrait with Letters (1963), the first references to Margot
are in the notes that Cory wrote to the letters that he received from Santayana during 1933,
where he refers to her as his 'future wife."
In the spring of 1937, Cory brought his fiancee with him to Rome and introduced
her to Santayana. She seems to have made a favorable impression on the then
sixty-three-year-old philosopher who treated her in a friendly way. This is not surprising,
because Margot was a tall, trim, nice-looking woman with a pleasant voice and a cultivated
accent that would have pleased Santayana Furthermore, she was exceptionally intelligent
and astute. They evidendy got on well, and she continued all her life to have a great regard
for Santayana as a person and as a writer. Later, in 1972, when Mrs. Cory succeeded her
husband as the Santayana literary executrix, she took great interest in all matters pertaining
to thepubhcanon of Santayana's writings, and, to the end of her life, was very conscientious
in discharging her executorial responsibilities.
Margot Batten and Daniel Cory lived together for several years, mainly in
Bournemouth, Cornwall, before they were married in a civil ceremony in Vevey,
Switzerland, on April 23, 1940. Daniel Cory was reluctant to notify Santayana of the
marriage immediately, evidently fearing that he would view the event as a fundamental
change in his own relations with Cory. For this reason, and because of the interruption of
postal services with Italy during World War n, Santayana, living in Rome, did not learn of
the marriage until four years later, with the resumption of mail service, in June 1944. His
response to the news indicated that he was not surprised that Cory had married Mrs. Batten,
and he congratulated him on the marriage. But Cory's apprehenslveness had not been
entirely unfounded. Santayana's concern, expressed in earlier letters, was not so much
1 In writing this notice, I have drawn upon information in Santayana's unpublished letters;
Cory's book, Santayana: The Later Years, mentioned above; and my own experience with Margot
Cory that began with first meeting her and Daniel in Tirolo di Merano in 1968. After Daniel Cory's
death, I visited her in Italy in 1972 and again in 1976 and corresponded with her regularly until the
end of her life. I am indebted to Mrs. Cory's nephew, Peter Degen, for his kindness in notifying me
of her death and for supplying information about her early life.